SGX Group Partners With CCL to Boost Remote Worker Engagement by Building Internal Coaching Skills & Capacity

Client Profile & Challenge

Singapore Exchange (SGX Group) is Asia’s leading and trusted securities and derivatives market infrastructure, operating equity, fixed income, currency, and commodity markets to the highest regulatory standards. SGX is committed to facilitating economic growth in a sustainable manner, leveraging its roles as a key player in the ecosystem, a business, a regulator, and a listed company.

Based in Singapore, SGX is Asia’s most international multi-asset exchange, providing listing, trading, clearing, settlement, depository, and data services. The organization is globally recognized for its risk management and clearing capabilities.

When the COVID-19 pandemic sent SGX’s workers home, it transformed how the company operated day-to-day and raised new opportunities and challenges for senior executives and managers.

In an environment where the person-to-person connections were only virtual, company leaders sought guidance on how to better engage employees. Based on feedback from employee surveys, members of the company’s executive management team saw a need to be more accessible and inspiring in the difficult period of the pandemic. Frontline managers, in turn, needed to establish a sense of community and connection with their teams working from home to better engage employees.

SGX scaled up digital learning at work and sought to amplify employees’ ability to transfer that learning to business applications. For deeper learning to occur, employees need to feel psychologically safe and highly connected. For SGX, it was people managers who had the most potential to create a space where employees were engaged and felt safe to better learn and apply those learnings to the business.

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SGX partnered with The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL)® to develop a coaching mindset and skills that would increase the leadership impact of managers and executives. The initiative had 2 main goals:

1. Create a cadre of internal coaches who would provide ongoing coaching to employees.
2. Develop an impactful coaching experience for senior leaders and high potentials embedded in intensive development programs.

SGX viewed coaching as a transformative leadership tool because of how its benefits could ripple through the organization and reach all groups the company was concerned about: senior leaders, people managers, and frontline workers.

CCL drew on its Better Conversations and Coaching curriculum to train about 40 senior leaders as internal coaches. The SGX and CCL teams worked closely to handpick and identify senior leaders with a developmental focus.

Across 2 levels of Better Conversations and Coaching, each with about 30 hours of training time, participant coaches learned 4 foundational skills:

• Listen to understand.
• Ask powerful questions.
• Challenge and support.
• Establish next steps and accountability.

Participants learned to use these skills in their day-to-day interactions, as well as in formal coaching sessions. Participants also received small group coaching from more experienced coaches.

Program Impact

CCL and SGX partnered to foster an internal community of coaches at SGX who support each other. Coaches met every quarter to share success stories and learnings. These high-impact sessions deepened reflection and advanced the learning among the leader coaches.

This program has created significant coaching capacity among the senior leaders of the organization and generated valuable opportunities for mid-level and frontline leaders to receive coaching. The leader coaches started by coaching their direct teams; some leaders also coach cross-functionally.

The prestigious Management Associate program at SGX was another opportunity to leverage senior leaders’ coaching capacity. A set of leaders from the group of 40 were assigned as mentors to the Management Associates through a structured six-month program. The goal was to provide every management associate with an internal coaching and mentoring opportunity.

SGX has successfully cultivated a comprehensive learning environment that prioritizes coaching and development, thereby fostering a robust learning culture. This strategic approach has led to a significant increase in employee engagement survey results on learning & development, surpassing industry norms. The company’s commitment to learning and development has resulted in employees feeling more engaged at work.

As SGX strengthens its culture and implements new business initiatives, senior leaders are better prepared to act as change coaches and culture ambassadors to continue the SGX growth story.

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